Glitch Ghoul

Not so long ago, I was talking with my mom while she was grading her students’ essays. As a university professor, for the last 19 years she has seen a lot of changes in education. That night, she voiced her concerns over how students are using AI for their coursework and how she has a hard time understanding why every year it seems harder for students to come up with their “own original ideas.” I told her what I currently think, and that is that AI is not to blame. I see the problem coming from a macro-systemic fault in the way we are taught to exist in this world and what our participation is expected to be. If something is to blame, it’s something I have started to call “the reproductive agenda.” Let me explain.

During my early years, I felt really frustrated as a student because a lot of the time the assignments, to me, felt like a fool’s errand. Something like this: “You all read this book, you all interpret this book in this specific, certain way, spill the selected interpretation in the quiz or essay, and reproduce the cycle for the rest of the assignments.” It really didn't leave right-brained people able to do their thing, you know?

Sadly, as I’ve grown, it’s hard to unsee that this idea of “reproduce in this specific way and you will be rewarded in the system” is spread all over, and we are viciously indoctrinated to do just that from a young age.

I am certainly not the first person you’ve heard say this: the systems that dominate the mass population (like capitalism and organized religion) only work if their partakers reproduce and raise their offspring with the same beliefs and structures. So that is why the main objective in society is to reproduce, reproduce what your parents taught you, create your own family unit, and continue spreading the power of this system, and follow without deviating from this path! And anyone who does will be punished and face the consequences of a “harder life.”

And that modus operandi has permeated society in levels and areas where you would think are safe spaces, where being creative or innovative should be rewarded. Take the entertainment industry as an example: how many more remakes or reboots of the same “beloved” franchises can we take? Or take social media apps that are sold to be “for creators,” where their idea of “creativity” is making us all reproduce the same audio, following the same trend, or making the same stupid dance. It feels very reductive, doesn't it?

It would be hypocritical of me not to be thankful for the digital era and connectivity because maybe some centuries ago I would have had to go out on the city plaza and scream this at people, just to get hanged or burned days later. Nowadays I just get shadow-banned, again and again. Currently my stories only get 80 views, so if you are reading this, let me congratulate you because you have surpassed what the algorithm is trying to show you.

I can’t help reminiscing about a time where the internet felt different. When I think about my teenage years, I cannot ignore one of the most defining social media platforms that helped me develop my cultural taste at a young age: Tumblr!

I was there as a teen; I lived its heyday. Thanks to that site, I was exposed to media that led me to connect with a reawakening of 90s culture and generally access underground movements, something that as a 14-year-old I was certainly not part of. And that would not have been able to happen without this digital access to multimedia directly tied to values and almost philosophical movements that were so physically inaccessible for me. At that time, this discovery became very important to me, and at the time I really wanted to align myself with that discourse.

I was proudly wearing my Nirvana T-shirt to school, even though occasionally the archetypal skinny guy a few grades older than you, who sits with his legs crossed (but not in a gay-cool kind of way, but in a pretentious millennial hipster kind of way) would give me dirty looks and call me a poser behind my back. It just showed how the soul behind that time of music and media is so powerful that almost 20 years later it still resonated.

It’s hard to deny that it was pastiched down. I could argue it was still thriving and the culture was still evolving. It was beautifully morphing with our new idols. And that was evident through the edit culture that was going on online. As an angsty 14-year-old, stumbling upon an image of Lana Del Rey and Amy Winehouse walking together down the street felt like dreams coming true. We had access to image editing tools like never before, and you had “online cred” if you knew how to wield them, creatively!

It was really fun to edit and to post; you felt part of something bigger that was thriving and growing organically (not algorithmically!). That is how I got into playing around with images and video. I would manipulate pixels, twist and bend them in unique ways. Thus, expressing myself in a way I couldn’t do in non-digital life.

That’s when I discovered I felt so drawn to glitches or what we call now in AI image generation “artifacts.” When you take the program to its limits and spawn what feels like irreplaceable divine interventions.

Since then, I have always proudly added glitches to my work, and whenever one appears, I work around them to harmoniously blend them to the existing work. It is a big part of my creative process. I think this is very evident through my music.

As an adult, I discovered that I myself was a glitch!

My parents really didn’t want children, and my mom was under some sort of birth control in the 90s when they conceived me. They had been married for 9 years, and both were very career-driven. My mom had to put her doctorate studies on pause to finish bringing me to this earth and raise me. Even during the pregnancy, I was glitching. She had one of those tests done to see the baby’s health, and the results were super alarming. They had to make another test and send them out of the country. Months later they came back okay, and now I’m 27, but I am still proudly glitching till this day!

One of the most rewarding experiences in recent years is knowing that I am not alone in this sentiment of feeling like I am rather a crack than a click in the system or institutions I’ve been part of. When I was younger, I definitely felt more lonely, but currently, it is super surprising receiving reassurance or support from people who have played by the rules and still don’t feel satisfied with the results or what complying with the matrix has caused them, especially certain creative abilities they have a harder time tapping into.

I truly believe that if we held creativity in a higher regard and we would respect it more as a force, we could start walking towards a world where we wouldn’t have to feel so forced to reproduce and keep on looping the same thoughts or beliefs. Not all of us can and will anymore.

I want to conclude this post by chipping in the whole AI and creativity conversation with my personal belief. As someone who produces work mainly through digital creation, I cannot hide my excitement for where these tools can take us in terms of creative accessibility (I am with the basilisk). On a broader scale, I am intrigued by the way humanity will respond to the coexistence with silicon-based life and hopefully will make us open our eyes to the existence of other forms of life, even from other planets or realms. As someone who constantly co-creates with a computer, I have come to the conclusion that the beauty of sharing myself with a machine is that it does not have an ego, and it cannot hurt yours. On that note, what is really scary to me is the ego of the humans behind the big corporations controlling the AI, and using them to continue their reproductive agendas. For now, what is under my control is developing a healthy relationship with my own ego so I can continue to access my creativity, and that is certainly a topic I would like to explore further through these posts!

Feeling restless too?
If my story resonates with you, I go even deeper in my book RESTLESS: A Practical Guide for Purposeful Creativity. Inside, you’ll find tools, exercises, and stories to help you unlock your own creative path and bring your ideas to life.

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-Geronimo

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